Tom Ewing's Poptimist column is the only reason to visit the Pitchfork site (though I admit that once I'm there, I very quickly skim the list of latest album reviews to see if there's anything worth looking at).

i think it's great, you can tell he really loves the album but it's stuck behind this awful, ugly lit-wank bombast. it's just really funny, but also cool that they weren't afraid to be that pretentious.

i realise a lot of UK indie is awful shit, but they don't really try very hard to care. they just give a 8.0 to every los camp album and then 0.8s to all the NME filler.

i don't really understand why they never reviewed johnny foreigner, they're definitely big enough to get a review and there was even one article or review where they alluded to them and called waited up "fantastic"

it doesn't really matter. it's just jofo are my favourite band and they deserve the exposure.

Seems to be the more hyped bands that get the slaggings - Meursault got 7.9, for instance. On the flipside, rare was the review of the last British Sea Power album that didn't contain something like "another album of U2-like stadium indie", an opinion nobody had of their music up until that DYLRM? P4K review.

Elliott Smith
Either/Or
[Kill Rock Stars]
Rating: 8.5
Whispering his way into your heart with the voice of an angel, Elliott's new solo record, Either/Or is the type of music you'd hear in Heaven's elevator: While everything's nice and pretty, you're still pretty bummed out that you died.

Smith shares all his personal secrets with us like other Smiths before him. (i.e. The Smiths, The Cure's Robert Smith, etc.) The result is nothing less than Zoloftian genius. I'll put money down that says this is the best album Kill Rock Stars releases for a couple of months.

Was the greatest message board I've come across. A combination of hipster douchebag belly laughs and intelligent music chat. So many great threads. DiS comes close - though not quite as addictive - or maybe I'm just getting older.

Shame they took it down - but I guess it was beginning to get as much attention as the articles themselves and Ryan couldn't handle not being in control of everything that was said on the site.

I can barely move my head now. There have been so many NWW albums released now that there's no room in my apartment for all of them. I've had to amputate both my legs and construct prosthetics out of the NWW packaging. Currently, half my body is NWW albums, and they're weighing me down. Please send this review to Steven Stapleton so he knows someone is listening and that only he can stall this flood. "The sucking recess of my cunt to the nut of muscle that is my asshole."

i didn't read ^this until very recently and it really is spot on, and i say that as someone who used to really like the album, and now thinks it's quite shit. but it will always remind me of sitting in the sun in my friends garden when we'd just finished our GCSEs.

Can't they just have a cut-off score and award anything BNM that gets above that score? The other thing that annoys me is certain bands they hand out consistently good reviews for, and then conveniently leave off their Best Of Year lists (see Sunset Rubdown, Menomena). Other than that, it remains my first port of call, usually very reliable, and the writing has got better (read: less pretentious) over the years.

Sometimes I think that it's all I really want from music writing. The perfect balance of really caring about the music they write about, whilst also not giving a fuck what people think (that 'U.2' BSP review, the Jet review, the Black Kids review- all class). The earlier reviews seem mind numbingly pretentious, glad that's in the past though. It never feels too try hard intellectual, never too hipsterish. Just right.

Though yeah, don't really like their attitude towards UK bands (or at least towards UK bands who don't idolise US bands), also all the Pitchfork TV stuff is pretty shit/features Pains of being pure at heart a million times. I also sometimes think that the site is too big. But overall I love it.

and the site has introduced me to a hell of a lot of great new music (and some great old music I missed out on), as well as occasionally putting a new spin on music I already know. And that is all I ask of music journalism.

Used to get me into loads of stuff, now I just find it has crawled entirely up its own arse. Some of the stuff they gush over is alright, nothing more. Just look at the best new music section - full of bland crap.

it would suggest to me that they think any old pish will do and that they're convinced they're right in doing it. Because I agree, whereas a couple years ago P4k consistently suggested some brilliant new music, it's been in sharp decline, and they seem obsessed with a certain group of bands and artists who aren't very interesting, and of course whatever Odd Future are up to.

Bearing in mind I love Autechre's album Untilted and mostly dislike Pitchfork and its writers sometimes unhealthy obsession with music, I thought their unconventional review of it was quite good and quite spot on, seeing as I think they're mostly wrong about other Autechre and 'IDM' albums. Though 7.4 is too low.